


Hallways of Horror

by Nevanna



Category: Extreme Ghostbusters (Cartoon), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Haunted Houses, Phobias, Pre-Canon, Screenplay/Script Format, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), discussion of disease, discussion of maggots, discussion of other fear entities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:15:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25790455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevanna/pseuds/Nevanna
Summary: Statements of Kylie Griffin and Garrett Miller regarding strange occurrences in a recently renovated hotel.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Hallways of Horror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [1TakeJohnny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/1TakeJohnny/gifts).



> This crossover requires canon knowledge of _The Magnus Archives_ through Season 3. It does not require canon knowledge of _Extreme Ghostbusters_ , although the statement directly concerns the events of episode 1.03, "Fear Itself."
> 
> Thanks to John for making this crossover possible, Winter Hatt for beta reading, and everybody who encouraged me as I was writing!

**GARRETT:** ...the last time that elevator got inspected? And was the _inspector_ a ghost?

 **GERTRUDE:** You are more than welcome to register a complaint at the front desk. Unfortunately, our maintenance crew have never considered the Archives a priority. Now, why don’t you begin by stating your names?

 **KYLIE:** Kylie Griffin.

 **GARRETT:** Garrett Miller. Are you familiar with the service we provide back in the Big Apple…?

 **GERTRUDE:** Indeed. After Ms. Griffin contacted the Institute, we looked into the publicity that your… _enterprise_ has garnered. I would have thought that the incident in question constituted a perfectly normal workday for you.

 **KYLIE:** Well, we _thought_ it did.

 **GERTRUDE:** Statements regarding strange occurrences in a recently renovated hotel, taken directly from subjects. Getrude Robinson recording.

 **KYLIE:** Egon Spengler and his team busted ghosts together in the Eighties, but by the time we met him, the group had split up, and he was teaching Paranormal Phenomena 101 at New York City College. Even when only four people showed up to his class.

 **GARRETT:** Gotta admire the guy’s dedication.

 **KYLIE:** Garrett and I were there because we _did_ admire him. Maybe you have his books in your library? _[Brief laughter]_ Pretty sure you have every book _anyone’s_ ever written about the supernatural in your library. If we didn’t have a job to do, I’d ask to spend more time up there.

I always believed that there was more to reality than what our ordinary senses could pick up; that’s what made me read Egon’s books. That’s what made me try to connect with the spirit world, even when it got me into trouble. And Garrett–

 **GARRETT:** I wanted to hear about the _action_. I knew Egon had to have some stories about all the ghost butt he kicked. Pretty sure he wasn’t looking for new recruits, but that was before a bunch of tunnel workers opened a portal and let an army of ghoulies into our world. Turned out that our classmates were up for fighting them, too: Roland souped up some of the older ghost-hunting tech, Eduardo started growing himself a backbone, and we were in business.

 **KYLIE:** Even when I was staying up all night to study for a test after locking something with _way_ too many arms into our containment unit, it still felt like we were making a real difference, y’know?

 **GARRETT:** You still _studied_ for your tests?

 **KYLIE:** One of our early cases took us to an old hotel that some rich developer wanted to turn into a nightclub. Whatever he saw when he was exploring the place, it turned him into a total nervous wreck. We got to the scene just as the paramedics were taking him away.

 **GARRETT:** It was a fear of heights, wasn’t it? That’s what got him.

 **KYLIE:** I think so, yeah. And we got a PKE blast from both him and the building.

 **GARRETT:** That’s psycho-kinetic energy, in case you’re not familiar with the lingo.

 **KYLIE:** She works for a paranormal research outfit. I think she’s heard it once or twice.

 **GERTRUDE:** _She_ would like you to continue your story, if you please.

 **KYLIE:** Once we got inside the hotel, we split up. Maybe not the best idea ever, looking back, but the place was all hallways, twisting away from each other in every direction, and I was pretty sure that if we stuck to just one of them, we’d never find the ghost. Turns out, it found us. Or I guess you could say, _they_ did.

When I was a kid, my family spent part of every summer at my Great-Grandma Rose’s house upstate. My cousins and the neighbors and I used to wander around the woods, making up games and stories about the magical creatures that lived there -- the scarier, the better. But nothing scared me as much as the first time I saw a dead animal rotting under a log, maggots wiggling all over it, in and out of its body… _[inhales and exhales]_ I ran back to the house screaming, and when my cousin Chad teased me about it, I threw my shoe at him. 

I never stopped having bad dreams about what I saw. It’s the kind of nightmare that wasn’t always on my mind, but always surprised me with how powerful it was. Yeah, maybe I could read book after book about life after death, just as long as I didn’t think too much about what happened to people’s _bodies_ as they rotted. 

It didn’t help that the first ghost we ever met, right after we signed up for Egon’s class, came into our world yowling about _disease_ . Like a lot of diseases, _and_ like a lot of spectral entities, she needed a host to survive. And when I drew her to me by accident -- or by playing with things that I shouldn’t have - she definitely found one. Crawled right inside me and used my body to turn innocent bystanders into incubators for her “children” until they were ready to wiggle out of their victims’ skin. I guess I was lucky, later on -- I could’ve had to relive _that_.

 **GARRETT:** We sent the whole “family” packing.

 **KYLIE:** Which let me think about something besides how dirty I felt inside. How _rotten_.

The creature that haunted the old hotel, it _knew_ how much I hated crawling things. As soon as I broke off from the group, I followed my next PKE reading down into the basement, and that’s when the maggots -- _way_ more than you’d find in a normal pile of garbage -- started pouring into the room, up from the floor, down from the ceiling, crawling all _over_... They were on my skin and in my hair, and I was convinced that any second, they’d start burrowing into me...

 **GARRETT:** Want me to take it from here? We heard her scream, but by the time we found her, the crawlies had disappeared. We figured out that our ghost latched onto our worst fears and made them real. Visible, touchable, smellable, the works. The developer, Swank, was scared of heights. I guess Roland was scared of his proton pack turning into a tentacle monster and chasing him…

 **KYLIE:** He was scared of his equipment _failing_ him. One way or another.

 **GARRETT:** And all Eddie had to do was take a look at the coffin around the next corner, and he was sure it was meant for him. If I wasn’t such a good friend, I would’ve given him grief for hiding behind me.

 **GERTRUDE:** A coffin, you said? Was anything written on its lid?

 **GARRETT:** Nope. Don’t think so. Why?

 **GERTRUDE:** And what about yourself, Mr. Miller? What frightens _you_ the most?

 **GARRETT:** Confined spaces. The less room I have to move, the more I freak out. When I ended up in that coffin instead, I was convinced it’d locked on top of me, and I’d run out of air before anyone found me. 

**KYLIE:** _[scoffs]_ I thought we’d have to threaten you with unspeakable torture to get you to admit that.

 **GARRETT:** _[uncertain]_ Yeah, well, we’re both baring our souls today, I guess. When your body’s struggling to get air in its lungs, it almost doesn’t matter whether something’s just messing with your mind. But I wasn’t gonna just lie there and choke on my fear -- not when the team needed me. As soon as I realized that, I was able to push open the coffin and climb out. Maybe it was never even locked at all.

Even if I couldn’t stop the doors from disappearing or the walls and ceiling from closing in, I kept my cool long enough to blast through them. Use what you got, right? And maybe I couldn’t stop the others from freezing up when they were nose-to-nose with their own worst nightmares. But once we were out in the open, I knew those nightmares couldn’t do nothing to _me,_ so I could take them on. All I had to do was zoom over Roland’s techno-monster a few times with my chair, and that critter was permanently extinct. Kylie took on Eddie’s creepy zombie clone...

 **KYLIE:** And it was pretty satisfying to see Roland and Eduardo shove a maggot the size of a truck off the nearest ledge. Everyone’s afraid of something, but we were most vulnerable when we were on our own. Once each of us admitted to our fears, instead of being alone with them, we could fight and conquer each other’s.

 **GERTRUDE:** And I assume you… ah… ‘busted’ the entity that had caused all of that trouble?

 **KYLIE:** We would have… except it turned out to be a lot smaller and more pathetic than we thought. [ _Pencil scratching]_ It looked kind of like _this_. I think it was acting in self-defense when the construction workers disturbed its home. We convinced them to wall it back up, and as far as we know, there hasn’t been any trouble at that site since.

Then we heard about the string of weird manifestations and disappearances in houses all over London. Doors appearing and vanishing, walls moving, people losing time or hearing voices and seeing monsters, or even walking inside and never coming out. Dekker, the guy who told us all this, said that your city doesn’t exactly have its own branch of the Ghostbusters, but the Magnus Institute might be the next best thing. He said we’d be better off talking to you than to the man in charge.

 **GARRETT:** Eddie and I flipped a coin to decide who’d go knocking on doors with Roland and who was gonna spend a beautiful afternoon in the library that time forgot... and here we are.

 **GERTRUDE:** I see. Well, thank you both for the information. How long do the four of you intend to stay in London?

 **KYLIE:** For the next week, but we can hang around longer if this isn’t worked out before then.

 **GERTRUDE:** In that case, we’ll be sure to contact you within the next day if any further collaboration is necessary.

 **KYLIE:** Thank you.

 **GARRETT:** You sure you don’t want to stick around, Ky? Seems like you’ve found your people.

 **GERTRUDE:** We would be the judge of that. I can’t promise that this workplace is entirely without risk or sacrifice, but it would seem that you’re used to such things, my dear.

 **KYLIE:** Yeah, maybe... but me and the guys have always had each other’s backs so far.

 **GERTRUDE:** That’s certainly a… comforting way of looking at things. Now, if you’d leave your details with Michael before you go…

_[Click]_

**GERTRUDE:** Well, then. I can’t say that I was pleased when I heard that the so-called “Ghostbusters” had resumed their activities. Even allowing for media bias, it would seem that, in their original incarnation, they caused nearly as many problems as they solved. However, they did manage to slow the activity of several Entities with a minimum of lasting harm, even if they did not always understand what they were fighting, and all four of them apparently survived to see a new generation carry on their endeavors. And perhaps Michael wasn’t entirely wrong when he pointed out both groups “sound like they’re just trying to make the world a little less scary.”

If the description of twisting hallways and disappearing doors weren’t proof enough of which Entity resided in that hotel, the behavior of Roland Jackson’s instruments, transforming and taking on a hostile life of their own, certainly indicated the presence of the Spiral. In this manifestation, it did much of its work by mimicking the properties of other fears altogether, such as the Vast, in the case of Mr. Swank. Mr. Rivera grappled with the End, Mr. Miller was waylaid by the Buried, and Ms. Griffin had some undeniable trauma relating to the Corruption. The creature that she sketched for us does not match any manifestations from pre-existing statements, and if it _is_ an avatar of the Spiral, it could just as easily have originated from a prehistoric animal as from a human. I don’t exactly approve of her decision to leave it intact, but there is no evidence that destroying it would have been effective.

Although it’s possible that her background and expertise would serve our mission well, I don’t think that she would abandon her current team for a position at the Institute. It’s not often that I agree with Elias, but neither of us would want any of them sniffing about if anything… unfortunate should befall one of their own. For all that they strike me as foolhardy and sentimental, Adelard seemed to believe that we can all help each other, and I can’t bring myself to disagree. Permanently disrupting the efforts of It-Is-Not-What-It-Is will be more than a matter of knocking on doors and waving machinery about, but perhaps we can lessen its damage while we figure out how to prevent the end of the world. 


End file.
